All children are special; the trouble starts when parents think that their own children are so unique, beautiful and talented that they put them on a pedestal from which they can never quite descend into the real world. With a name like Plectrude, Amélie Nothomb's heroine doesn't stand much of a chance in the playground. "You can be called Marie and still be exceptional," suggests a prison warder at her birth. But her mother knows this child is different. The name Plectrude "will make her strong enough to defend herself", she replies, and she needs to be, with a mother who shot her father while she was pregnant and then hanged herself soon after the child was born.

Plectrude is adopted by her aunt Clemence, who honours her sister's memory by dressing her like a fairytale princess and taking her to ballet school. Normal school life from the age of six is a bitter disappointment; unsurprisingly, she is an outsider and isolated from other children. When she gains a place at the most prestigious ballet school in Paris and is talked of as a future Pavlova, Clemence is ecstatic. Plectrude will pursue the dream that had been denied to her, for Clemence had been refused entry to the same ballet school when she was a teenager.

Nothomb's darkly satirical novellas, most of them unashamedly semi-autobiographical, are bestsellers in France, and this is a disturbing, fantastical moral tale for our times. Plectrude's adolescent years as an anorexic in a brutal ballet school, where the girls exercise until they ache and are encouraged to starve themselves, are extraordinarily vivid. "Here there was no tenderness in the eyes of the adults," Nothomb writes, "merely a scalpel to slice away the last slice of childhood." With the loss of weight, Plectrude also loses feeling, until she starves herself of so much calcium that she breaks her leg and is told by the doctors that she can never dance again.

There is a poetic, elliptical quality to Nothomb's sparse, precise prose. She captures the crucial aspects of growing up with a light yet darkly comic touch; first crushes, fascination with death, the need for a destiny, the disillusionment with parents - it's all here. But so, too, is the troubled symbiosis between childhood and adolescence, and the acute agony for both mother and daughter when the child who was raised as a princess becomes an ugly disappointment as a teenager.

The destinies of mothers and daughters are interconnected, like a set of Russian dolls: Clemence is so embroiled in her daughter's destiny that she feels it to be her own. When Plectrude is hospitalised, Clemence becomes too ill to see her. When she discovers that Plectrude can never dance again, Clemence banishes her for ever by telling her the full truth of her origins. But like all good fairy tales, this one has a happy ending. The daughter escapes from the wicked witch and gets the guy.

She has 12 novels in print around the world, so it is astonishing that British publishers haven't discovered Nothomb's perverse, wacky wit and fertile imagination before now. Faber will be publishing two more novellas in August: Fear and Trembling, an extraordinary tale of a young western woman being ritually humiliated by her bosses in a large corporation in Japan; and The Character of Rain, which enters the mind of a three-year-old. But for me it is her astute understanding of growing up and the damage done by mothers who see their daughters merely as extensions of themselves that has left its mark.

· Kate Figes's The Terrible Teens: What Every Parent Needs to Know is published by Penguin